Apple Podcast Analytics is finally live

Oh look, it finally happened! A little over a week before Christmas, no less. On December 14, 2017, Cupertino finally rolled out its long-awaited in-episode podcast analytics feature that allows publishers to learn just how much of their episodes are being consumed — at least, off the Apple Podcast app. While in-episode listening data has long been provided by a number of third-party apps, this is the first time publishers will receive that information from the Apple Podcast app, which is believed to drive the majority of all podcast listening.

The new feature is listed as still being in its beta phase, and it takes the shape of a visual dashboard displaying in-episode aggregate completion and drop-off rates. This essentially means you can now find out if anybody made it to that third midroll (whoops) or the late-game twist in the narrative (yikes) or if folks are generally opting to skip cold opens (oof). The prominence of ad-skipping, a potential podcast advertising bogeyman, can now also be identified through the new dashboard. True to Apple’s practices, user data is anonymized.

I’ve been yammering on about the significance of this development since the feature was first announced at Apple’s WWDC conference back in June (see here, here, and here).